It is impossible to read either of the assured novels by Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923) without the multiplied astonishment that he wrote them while still in his teens and regret that he died at the age of twenty. The novels have to -- and do -- stand on their own. Count d'Orgel's Ball (Le Bal du Compte d'Orgel) would not be back in print in English (in the canonizing New York Reviews series) only because the author died young 85 years ago. It is a very hard gem of a ré cit (or a roman).

Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh) created a scandal when it was published five years after the end of World War I because of its incendiary subject matter: the sexual affair of a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and a woman (all of 19 herself), Marthe Lacombe, whose husband was away in the army.

Not least because Radiguet was very visibly the proté gé of the very gay Jean Cocteau, the extend to which Le Diable au corps was autobiographical was not much suspected. Radiguet did not seem much like any of the four male characters in Le Bal du Compte d'Orgel though Count Orgel has been identified as being based on Count Étienne de Beaumont, whose guest Radiguet frequently was at the count's palace/chateau in Saint-Germain. (The count was married but "made no attempt to conceal his sexual preference" in the words of Cocteau biographer Frederick Brown).

I guess that makes Radiguet the model for François de Séryeuse, the twit in the novel who is befriended by the count (given name Anne), falls in love with the countess (Mahaut). She is (contrary to all expectations in high society, including that of her husband) very much in love with her husband and shocked to discover she has fallen in love with her husband's friend and their nearly constant visitor. François is similarly shocked to realize he has fallen in love, a feeling that betrays his friend even though this amour has to be among the most chaste in the long history of adulterous love in French literature.

Practically nothing happens in the book. The book is a splendid illustration of how humans can go forward in something seeming to be harmony while massively misunderstanding not only the feelings of others with whom they are intimate but misunderstanding their own feelings. Practically the only undistorted communication in the story is when Mahaut tells François's mother that she has fallen in love with François, so must not see him ever again. Even then, François's mother is slow to believe what the countess tells her (and rightly then realizes that François is in love with the countess, something the countess does not know, blaming herself entirely for inappropriate feelings).

Radiguet was not guided by the "Show don't tell" guideline. At every step he tells the reader how the characters are misunderstanding each other and their own feelings. I don't think his goal was to satirize high society, and he does not really denigrate the emotional stupidity he describes and analyzes. If anything, he seems touched by the foolish self-obstructions -- which is decidedly not a point of view one expects to issue from a 19-year-old! Nor the insights into determined commitment to frivolity.

A 19-year-old might be expected to embody such a commitment, but not to dissect it--as in noting of the count that "he was only expert at expressing what he did not feel." François's friend Paul, who leaves a mistress he really loves for a superficial and jealous American "cared more about other people's opinions than his own"--that is an analysis that it seems to me that a 19-year-old might make. And even that the count's appreciation for his wife was enhanced by others taking an interest in her ("Orgel experienced without knowing it the gratitude we feel toward one who envies us") or that for the count his "lies were not lies; his intention was to strike the imagination" (like a writer...).

I particularly admired the author's insights into François's mother and the ways in which she and her only son failed to understand each other. (This cannot be too autobiographical, since Radiguet not only had a living father but six younger siblings and could not have been the sole focus of his mother's attention.)

The denouement is handled with a delicate but very sure hand that does not break from the characters he established along the way.

Although Cocteau's mythopoetic introduction has to be included, I am somewhat disappointed that in contrast to almost every other book reprinted in the NYR series, there is not a preface by an analytic admirer of today. The perfect candidate is André Aciman, who characterized the book as "a prototypically French novella: irreducibly classical, ruthlessly analytical, and so thoroughly disabused that it is hard to believe anyone so young could have written it."

I think that the style influenced Cocteau more than Cocteau's influenced Radiguet (Cocteau was writing his WWI masterpiece, Thomas, l'imposteur at the same time Radiguet was writing Orgel and also, I think, the prose of Blaise Cendras.* (Everyone knew everyone else in the artistic world of Paris of the teens and twenties! Cocteau met Radiguet when the latter was either with Max Jacob or André Breton and Radiguet choosing Cocteau over Breton, the High Priest of surrealism, forever embittered Breton toward Cocteau.) In analytic style and in fealty to the un- or anti-aristocratic commitment to conjugal love, Orgel was inspired and to a degree modeled on Madame de Lafayette's (1678) Princess de Clèves (which André Gide considered one of the half dozen great French novels, but one which I do not remember very well from having read decades ago) in which the Duc de Nemours falls in love with the beautiful wife of his great friend, the Prince of Cleves in the court of the court of Henri II.

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* See Cendras's (1927) also remarkably chaste Confessions of Dan Yack. Not being in the epinions database, I wrote about it at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/793227/remembering_a_childbride_who_died_young.html?cat=38.


© 2008, Stephen O. Murray

In that I reread Count d'Orgel's Ball, can it be a French rediscovery, Barbara? (mine and the publisher's...) See her French find writeoff perversely homesited in a garden within a principality on the edge of France and the Mediterranean.






Recommended: Yes